That surreal moment when you walk your character past the campfire, through a clump of bushes with white flowers, down a set of stone steps, and toward an open field where a fiery orange sunset shines over the beach down below and think to yourself, "I made this"...

My first time working with Unity really got me into a creative mode. Even though I had to stop and start everything over again several times, I loved being able to construct a world with pre-made objects and environments. It was a digital equivalent of building something with Legos, or I guess the more modern equivalent of opening up a new file on MS Paint. Either way, it took me back.

One thing that really threw me for a loop with this assignment was just how large a space a single terrain covers. Since you look at the terrain from several views, you don't realize just how much empty space you need to fill until you put your first person control in. I tried to work around this as much as possible, adding small "sub-scenes" in different corners of my field, but don't think I quite succeeded. I went crazy, going through the asset store, trying to find appropriate things to add to the scene.

Inspired by the Tuscan villa simulator on Oculus, and to a greater degree by my family's summer home at Keuka Lake, I wanted to create a landscape for a private retreat. If I had more time, resources, and know-how, I would probably have worked a lot more with the property and figured out ways to add variety to the landscape.

The most frustrating part of this experiment though was in trying to create a scene with different levels of elevation. Working with the different "terrain height" settings easily took the most time and effort. It's so hard to gauge just how high a "60" or "100" level elevation really is, and there's no easy way to make elevated land slope up or down so that you can walk up or down between heights. Trying to make slopes or "steps" on the cliffs proved frustrating and nearly impossible. In the end, I just settled for two mildly raised pieces of terrain (never above "12") and ended up having to cheat and put in a prefab staircase to get to the upper level.

I'd like to be able iron out the difficulties of terrain levels and figure out the best ways to fill out space. Considering what I was working with, I'm fairly pleased with the way this turned out and am eager to go further into what Unity can do.